Four people standing in front of interactive display panels at a museum exhibit featuring large animal skeletons on a stone-textured floor.

Postcolonial natural history collections and museum and archive practices

Brigstow aims to support radically interdisciplinary and co-produced research, so for this theme we looked for teams from a number of disciplines and practices who were interested in exploring the research value of natural history collections and archives, and postcolonial methods of museum and archive practices.

Who could be involved?

While we aim to be as broad as possible in who we fund, here is a flavour of the type of people we had in mind.

Whilst this might particularly have appealed to people in earth science, environmental humanities, animal studies, botany or post-colonial studies, we were keen to include expertise from across all disciplines both within and beyond the University. As with all activity we support at Brigstow we were keen to engage creative ways of thinking and working which may include those already working in museum practices but not exclusively. Your work could focus on what’s in the collections themselves, or how we present, study and care for natural history collections that exist. We have been looking to build research teams that span both academic research staff and collaborators from outside of the University of Bristol.

Individuals might already have had idea and be looking to extend their team or just be interested in the topic and want to connect with people to build something fresh. No matter what stage you’re at, we welcomed everyone to join us.

How did we choose this theme?

This theme has evolved from a previous Ideas Lunch hosted by Brigstow early in 2024 called The Elephant in the Room: Animal Studies, Postcolonialism and Museums/Collecting. This meeting brought together people from various disciplines and organisations working in the sphere of postcolonial natural history collections.

In addition, over the past couple of years, we’ve seen a collection of different ideas, projects and relational research around this topic within our community, so we wanted to build on that energy.

This thematic cycle is formed of three stages. Find out more about our funding model.

Stage 1. Collaboration

May – July 2025. This stage has now finished

A series of events around Postcolonial natural history collections and museum and archive practices that helped connect interdisciplinary teams who may not have previously met to form ideas or to support ideas that might already be bubbling to the surface and to help facilitate connections with other expertise.

We held:

By the end of this stage individuals had:

  • Made new connections
  • Formed a research team of diverse expertise
  • Developed a research idea
  • Submitted an application for Connections Funding

Stage 2. Connections

Period of work: September – November 2025. This stage has now finished

Five teams from Stage 1 were awarded £1000 and given three months to develop and solidify growing ideas, partnerships and plans that have come out of the Collaboration stage. Find out more about the funded connections projects.

During this time, we supported them with:

  • A Funding circle
  • Co-production workshops
  • Creative methodology training
  • A webinar for those who received connections funding for this theme to present their work and share more information about Exploratory Research Funding: Exploratory Research Funding Webinar

By the end of this stage they had:

  • Solidified your partnerships
  • Developed your research idea
  • Developed a larger funding proposal. For example, submitting an application to our Exploratory Research Funding (deadline for applications 27 November 2025) or another funding body.

Stage 3. Exploratory Research Funding

Period of work: January – April 2026. This stage is currently in progress

A pot of funding worth £30,000 will be awarded to allow one or more of the teams who received connections funding to come together, explore common themes and further develop and carry out their proposed research project.

Find out more about Exploratory Research Funding